


Us Against The World

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Series: Series 12 Vignettes [3]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Episode: s12e01 Spyfall Part 1, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-15
Updated: 2020-02-15
Packaged: 2021-02-27 15:41:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22439707
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: Trapped in the Kasaavin's dimension, the Doctor tries desperately to return to her friends, even as the fear of history repeating itself sets in...
Relationships: The Doctor/The Master (Doctor Who), Thirteenth Doctor & Yasmin Khan & Graham O'Brien & Ryan Sinclair
Series: Series 12 Vignettes [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1731406
Comments: 2
Kudos: 37





	Us Against The World

The Doctor opened her eyes slowly, unsure where she was. It was dark and dank and cold, tinged with a metallic smell, and as she straightened up she took in the strange, dark shapes that surrounded her, running from the floor to the ceiling like ethereal kelp, but none of it really registered. The only thing she could think about were her friends, and how they’d looked in the seconds before she’d been teleported away from them. The three of them, faces contorted in terror, screaming in desperation as they’d looked to her for help. The whiteness of their knuckles as they’d clung to the plane seats and fittings, as though that might help when the plane went down, and the tears that had been spilling down Yaz’s cheeks. They’d been counting on her. They’d been relying on her to save them, and she’d failed them. She was their self-appointed protector, and she’d let them down, perhaps fatally so.

“No,” she breathed, shaking her head as she got to her feet. “No, no, no, no, no…”

She’d been so conflicted when she’d first understood who O really was; so joyous, in some ways, and yet so afraid. The Master, back again; the Master, not dead. Her oldest friend and her greatest enemy rolled into one, and yet she was simply relieved to no longer be the last of her kind, and to no longer have to be the sole being in the universe for whom Gallifrey was more than a lost planet, but instead a place that had been her home for hundreds of years. There had been a swooping sense of optimism and hope, then, to see another Time Lord, and yet that had almost at once been brought crashing back to earth as she discovered the bomb and his intentions, and realised that her friends were in danger.

He’d always seen this as a way to communicate; seemed to think it was cute or funny to get her attention in such ways, as though he didn’t understand any other way to express himself. Threatening her companions was an overarching motif that he seemed reluctant to deviate from in his little schemes, only usually… well, usually she was there to save her friends. She had saved Clara on Skaro, and she had tried her best to save Bill from a fate worse than death, until the tables had turned, her companion had been converted to a Cyberman, and Bill had saved her. Now, she had a chance at redemption, and she’d begun to operate solely on autopilot once she’d understood the Master meant to kill them all. She remembered placing her back against the cabin door; the white-hot heat that had scorched the back of her tuxedo as she’d tumbled to the floor when the bomb detonated, and the fragments of debris hitting her skin. She remembered the force of the explosion, and her total resignation to the pain, because it didn’t matter what happened to her. She was disposable; she was renewable. She could, if needs be, regenerate, although the prospect was far from appealing.

She’d wanted to save them. She still did; still yearned and ached to go back there and do her best, and yet she didn’t even know where she was; didn’t know how she’d got here, other than some kind of teleport, and she didn’t know whether the plane was even still intact any longer. Perhaps she was already too late. Perhaps her friends were already dead, and had spent their final seconds cursing her for forsaking them.

She fell to her knees, her head in her hands. She should have been there. She should have been allowed that final act of clemency, surely; should have been permitted to perish alongside them rather than surviving and bearing the guilt of their deaths. Her remorse already weighed on her so heavily, pressing down on her with each breath she took, and in her sleep, she saw the faces of those she could not save. They would stand before her with sombre expressions, still in the trappings in which they had met their deaths, and they would judge her silently. Bill. Clara. Amy. Rory. Countless others, whose names she repeated in a silent litany, because while her grief was burdensome, it was a weight she bore willingly; she kept their memory alive in honour of the fact she could not keep _them_ alive, and so she had become a kind of memorial in herself, keeping the fires of recollection burning.

Would Yaz, Ryan and Graham now appear to her in the depths of the night? Would she have to explain to their families why she was returning to them with nothing more than their broken bodies, their loved ones reduced to little more than shells? Would she have to stand vigil beside their graves, apologising silently as they were interred?

“I’m sorry,” she whispered, her hearts breaking. “God, I’m so sorry; I’m so, so sorry.”

She could hear Yaz’s screams still; could hear Ryan and Graham’s terrified cries. Their panic seemed a quantifiable, tangible thing, and it settled in the pit of her stomach like lead. That fear was her fault. If she’d never have met them, they’d be safe now. They wouldn’t be in the cabin of a burning aeroplane as it plummeted to Earth, their lives about to be extinguished like candle flames.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered again, tears trickling down her cheeks. “I was so stupid…”

How could she have failed to notice who O really was? How had she managed to spend the night in what she now suspected to be his TARDIS, and have overlooked that fact? Once she’d realised; once the penny had dropped; she’d felt his presence in her mind, and seen what she’d managed to overlook while she’d been so caught up in their mission. She’d somehow failed to see it; failed to notice the familiar psychic print of a fellow Time Lord, and once it became obvious, she felt a fool.

She’d worried then, in the moments before the bomb. Worried what he might say to her friends, or might reveal about her; the selfishness of her own concerns seemed laughable now, but they had been paralysing minutes before. He knew so much about her that he could weaponise, and her fears had centred around the shattering, in her companions’ eyes, of the myths of heroism that surrounded her. She had done things she wasn’t proud of; committed genocides and executions, fought in wars, and led people to their deaths. She had, in the Master’s view, abandoned him on Gallifrey, as she had abandoned so many others over the years, and she had been afraid that with those revelations then the scales might fall from her friends’ eyes; that they might see her for who she truly was, and turn away from their friendship.

What a fool she had been. The Master delighted in chaos, yes, but his attempts at destroying her friends’ trust in her were, this time at least, far more physical than psychological. Perhaps he was going to save them at the last moment, or at the very least save one of them; perhaps he would then make the grand revelation about the Doctor, and turn her friends against her. Perhaps that was his plan; to take them away from her and fashion them into weapons. It was what Davros had accused her of, all those years before on a Dalek ship, and she had little doubt that the Master would revel in doing the same.

The Doctor had rehabilitated Missy, or so she’d thought. All those years in the Vault and all that training; all those hours spent together learning and discussing and crying; it all seemed to have meant naught. She’d allowed herself to grow attached to the idea of her, and allowed herself to hope. And yet with a single regeneration, all of her efforts had melted away like wax, stripped away with the cells that had made up Missy as the Master reverted to type. The pain of that revelation – that where she had once meant something; once meant enough to respect, and express affection for – hurt almost as much as the thoughts of her friends’ deaths. She had been foolish enough to convince herself that Missy cared for her, and yet she had been wrong; it was a now a reversion to type as she became the object of dastardly plots that, it seemed, were borne not of affection or genuine attempts to express such, but were merely due to a desire to take over the world, and hang anyone who got in the way.

Their time together counted for nothing. _She_ counted for nothing. Her oldest friend, who had never quite recovered from that first betrayal, that so-called ‘abandonment,’ was now targeting the things she held dear. She had seen some of the Master’s old fire on the space station, as he and Missy had turned Bill into a Cyberman in a bid to hurt the Doctor where she was at her weakest – her friends. And now, the same; the same targeting of her friends, and the same attempt to plunge metaphorical daggers into her hearts and invoke from her an agonised, emotional kneejerk response, which the Master was clearly counting on. And yet he was too smart for that; too far ahead of her; and she dared not attempt some grand feat of escape via exploding… well, wherever this was, lest she turn out to have been concealed in some kind of dimensional container in the plane’s hold, and in doing so would prove the final nail in the coffin to bring the jet down. She wouldn’t put it past him to ensure that she was the ultimate architect in her friends’ fate, and so she sat back on her haunches and wiped her eyes, trying to steady her breathing as she thought of a plan.

The sound of their screams struck through her again, and it was then that she realised that it was not her own guilt causing such a loop; not her brain imagining it; but a real sound. A real, tangible sound that was playing through a concealed speaker, and thus had a source that she could trace.

A spark flickered to life inside of her.

Hope.


End file.
